Phineas Troutt Series - Three Thriller Novels (Dead On My Feet #1, Dying Breath #2, Everybody Dies #3)

by J. A. Konrath

  “I have some questions about Amy Scadder.”

  He appeared to think about it. “You’re not a cop,” he eventually said.

  “Private.”

  “Who hired you?”

  I waited.

  We stared at each other.

  I expected him to slam the door. He didn’t. I could maybe talk my way in, or force my way in, or come back later.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  Or I could just follow him in.

  We walked through a foyer into a living room and he plopped down on a leather couch, legs open, hands on his knees, looking completely neutral. No fear, no anger, no worry, no curiosity.

  Just unblinking, dead eyes.

  The only place to sit while facing him was a deep reclining chair, and if I sat in that I wouldn’t be able to get to my feet quick if I needed to. So I stood over him.

  “How long did you date Amy?”

  “Date? Shit, she was just a piece of ass I’d tap.”

  “How long did you tap her ass, then?”

  “Couple months. I haven’t seen the bitch in years. She just stopped calling me. Don’t know where she is.”

  I didn’t say anything. Most people didn’t like long pauses in conversations. They would talk, out of nervousness.

  “Her father hired you to find her, didn’t he? That guy is a real asshole.”

  I chose my next words carefully. “I didn’t say she was missing.”

  Tucker’s eyes narrowed, just a little.

  Physically, I didn’t think he would be too much of a problem for me. I thought about where I was going to hit him first.

  “Her mom called me up,” he said. “Told me she ran away.”

  “Phyllis told you that?”

  He shrugged. “Old lady had a thing for me.”

  “Phyllis told me different.”

  “Did she? What she say?”

  “That you killed her daughter,” I said. “And that you have a really small dick.”

  Tucker blinked, and then fast as a whip he had a funny-looking pistol in his hand. He had pulled it out from under the cushion between his legs.

  I’d missed it completely.

  I looked at the gun, then at his face. His expression was still dead.

  “Dumb shit,” he said, though I didn’t know if he meant me or Amy’s mother.

  I could have reacted right then. I had a moment. In that instant I could have dove to the side and pulled my own gun, giving me at least a chance.

  Or I could have jumped him; he was only three feet away.

  Or kicked the gun from his hand.

  Or tried to talk my way out of it.

  But I didn’t.

  I didn’t do anything.

  I just stood there, and untensed my muscles as best I could, and felt Earl squirming inside me, and let out a deep sigh that was my goodbye to the world.

  Our eyes locked. His finger tensed.

  “Do it,” I told him.

  He pulled the trigger and shot me in the chest.

  I fell backwards into the La-Z-Boy, my world spinning, unable to take a breath. My consciousness faded, like a giant black circle closing around me.

  I saw Pasha, and we were sitting under a tree, an apple tree, and we were laughing, and I gave Pasha a hug and told her that I loved her and she smiled and said she loved me too.

  And then I was gone.

  JACK

  Sleep and I failed to find one another.

  Christ knows I looked hard enough. I wound up finally crapping out at the usual hour of four in the morning, only to have to get up at seven to go to work.

  I forced my way through morning exercises, trying to beat the weariness out of my body by making it even more weary.

  Blood pooling.

  I skipped the sit-ups and went to the shower, stared at my belly when I took off Latham’s T-shirt, and came back out to do the sit-ups. Since I started my morning exercise routine a few years back, I’d yet to see any vast improvements in my physique. But it hadn’t gotten too much worse either.

  It was a struggle to maintain mediocrity.

  But ‘tis a worthy struggle. If I quit, I might balloon like Herb Benedict, who has tracked down his share of missing persons but who will never be able to find his own lap.

  Steel factory.

  I hopped back into the shower, my sloth guilt abated, and then assembled my public persona; clothes, face, hair, shoes. I had no more dry-clean-fresh clothes at Latham’s place, but I found a blouse and skirt in the hamper that passed the sniff test, and matched them with my blazer and shoes from yesterday.

  My Nova needed three squirts of starter fluid into the carburetor, plus several bouts of encouragement, before it decided to turn over. If I had any sort of good credit rating, I would have bought or leased a new car years ago. But the only way a bank would give me money is if I went in with a ski mask and my .38. And even then I’d still be charged 20% over prime rate.

  As I was cranking the engine, a tow truck stopped next to me.

  Tow truck.

  “Need help lady?”

  The lady needed help with a lot of things. But she could handle starting her own car.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Got a real classic there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give you a hundred bucks for it.”

  I actually considered it for a moment.

  “Cash,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’m gonna keep it.”

  He shrugged and pulled away.

  After the morning start-the-car ritual, I checked out the atmosphere and decided it was going to be a crappy day. The sky was that ugly, overcast grey that only appeared in cities with smog problems. A drizzly, damp, depressing day, if I may alliterate, with little hope of improving.

  Let’s hope the case didn’t go the same way.

  Swarf.

  My subconscious was really working today. On what, I had no idea.

  Traffic wasn’t too terrible, and I got to the station at my usual quarter after nine. Benedict was already in my office, leafing through a copy of the latest coroner’s report. He was wearing that awful orange and green tie, the one that looked like someone murdered Kermit the Frog and tied him around Herb’s neck. I wondered yet again what happened to that tie I bought him for his birthday.

  “Morning, Herb.”

  “Morning, Jack.”

  “Whatever happened to that tie I bought you?”

  “What tie?”

  “For your birthday. The silk one.”

  “Oh. That one. You want some coffee?” He gestured to the Mr. Coffee now sitting on the corner of my desk. “I brought it from home,” he told me. “It’s Columbian dark roast.”

  “Smells great.”

  I usually drank out of paper cups, but I had a mug in my file drawer and after dumping out the pens it was holding I had Herb fill me up.

  It smelled good enough to drink. I took a sip and let the bitter taste tease my tongue.

  “It’s great,” I told him. And it was. I should have brought a coffee maker in years ago, and wondered why I never had. I took another sip and the phone rang.

  “Daniels.”

  “Bains. You and Benedict in my office.”

  I hung up, relayed the news to Herb, and off we went.

  Someone must have finally found the guts to talk to the chief about his appearance, because when we walked into his office I immediately noticed that his mustache and his hairpiece finally matched. But instead of adding grey to his hair, as he should have, he went the other way and dyed the mustache. Now they we matching bottle-brown, making his fifty plus years of wrinkles stand out like some cruel joke.

  “I’m getting shit all over, and I want to make sure it trickles down,” he said. “Your report didn’t mention the media.” His voice finger-pointed in my direction.

  “The Mount Cisco cops had the scene tight. Reporters were cordoned off.”

  He handed over the paper on his desk, letting me see
the photo. It was today’s Tribune, and the headline read “Motel Mauler Claims Third.” The photo was a sickening color shot of the inside of that truck.

  “Telephoto lens,” I said. “He must have been hiding someplace far off.”

  “And how did they connect this to the motel case?”

  “Are you saying that we told them? Captain, the Mount Cisco police called us. We didn’t say anything.”

  He flipped the page, and there was an above-crease unflattering picture of me, talking with Captain Francis T. Butchman. I read the caption.

  They spelled my name Jaclyn, like Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith. Should have been Jaqueline with a Q.

  “Interrogating local law enforcement isn’t talking to the media,” I said.

  He pointed to an inch of column, which read, Butchman confirmed with CPD ‘it looks like our guy’.

  Oops.

  “They spelled my name wrong,” I said, defensively.

  Bains stared at me like I’d sprouted a second nose. “I don’t give a shit. I’m getting my ass reamed so many times I need Do Not Enter printed on my underwear. The mayor, the governor, the police commissioner, they’re all being assaulted with calls by concerned taxpayers demanding to know what we’re doing to protect them. It made national coverage, and CNN wants to do a story about modern serial killers, using this city as a backdrop. Now tell me you’ve got some sort of scrap I can throw to the wolves, or the scrap I throw will be you.”

  It was as tough a threat as Bains had ever given me, and while I didn’t fear for my job, I wouldn’t doubt he’d pull me off the case if the soup got too thick to swallow. Scapegoat detail wasn’t fun.

  And then my subconscious proved that it was worth something

  “I think I know where those chips in the tires came from,” I said.

  Herb raised an eyebrow, wondering why I hadn’t shared this revelation with him. That was because I’d only made the connection right at that moment.

  “No keys in the truck,” I said. “Automatic transmission, left in neutral, but the parking brake wasn’t set.”

  Bains said, “So? They abandoned it. Who cares about the gear it was in, or if the brakes were set?”

  “Do you drive stick or auto?” I asked the Captain.

  “Both.”

  “Do you always set the parking brake on your manual vehicle? And always put it in park on your automatic? And why wasn’t there a padlock on the back? Why make discovering the victim even easier? If you’re the killers, you wouldn’t do that. You would have locked it up.”

  “Where are you going with this, Jack?” Bains said.

  I folded my arms across my chest, convinced that my hunch was correct. “The blood in the rental truck only pooled in back, but it was found on level ground.”

  I waited for one of them to get it. They didn’t.

  “It was towed there,” I finally revealed.

  After a moment, Bains asked, “Why? Why not drive it?”

  “Because the killers had the keys, and the killers didn’t take it there.”

  “Who did?”

  “The rental truck,” I said, probably looking every bit as smug as I felt, “was stolen.”

  Herb nodded. “Makes sense. Someone jacked it, cut the lock, saw what was in the back, and dumped it.”

  Bains didn’t look impressed. “With a tow truck?”

  “I just talked to a motorist yesterday,” I said, recalling the guy with the Mini Cooper who sniped my parking spot. “His car was stolen, by a tow truck. You know the jump in stolen vehicles these last few months? What if they’re riding around in a tow truck, grabbing whatever they want?”

  “No one would question a tow truck,” Herb added. “You could steal a car right in the middle of a crowded parking lot, and no one would even notice it.”

  “Did you confer with Property Crimes?”

  “Not yet.” Because I just thought of it a minute ago. “But they can tell us if any stolen vehicles have been recovered with metal shavings embedded in the tires.”

  “If the chop shop is in an old factory, or machine shop, the cars would pick up swarf,” Herb said.

  Bains said, “Swarf?”

  “The metal is called swarf,” I said. “If we can find the factory, and bust the car thieves, we can find out where they stole the truck.”

  Bains stroked his brown mustache. A moment later he was on the phone with the task force, asking them to get a list of every place in Chicago where metal was shaved.

  “Swarf,” he said into the phone for the fourth time. “S-W-A—” he glanced at me.

  “R-F,” said Herb.

  “R-F. I want that list within the hour.”

  Then he got on the horn with the head guy in Property Crimes and set up an appointment for Benedict and me to chat with him after lunch. After that he dismissed us, and started calling all of the higher ups, asking them to constipate themselves because we had a lead.

  Herb and I went back to my office.

  The coffee machine was gone.

  We spent the better part of half an hour searching the precinct for it, yelling like banshees at every cop we came across. All roads led to bullshit.

  “Sorry, Herb. Should have locked my door.”

  “They’re cops, for crissakes. We’re supposed to be a fraternal order. Who would take my damn coffee machine?”

  As far as I was concerned, everyone was a suspect. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a Murder On The Orient Express thing, and every single cop in the place had a hand in it.

  “We can go around smelling everyone’s breath for Columbian dark roast,” I suggested.

  Benedict hmphed and began to read his copy of the autopsy report. I sat at my own desk, finished the little coffee left in my cup, and began to read mine.

  I hadn’t gotten two minutes into it when the phone rang again. Maybe it was the Mr. Coffee thief, so overwhelmed by guilt that they wanted to confess.

  “Daniels.”

  “Hines down in Holding. Had a guy here on a reckless driving rap, screaming out your name. Got so annoyed I left him in your office. Wanted to make sure you got him okay.”

  The informers I had were few and far between, most going back to my patrol days. But it never hurt to talk to them when they were desperate. Desperate men had loose tongues, and maybe something would develop from what he had to tell me. Maybe he even knew who took the Mr. Coffee.

  “I don’t see anyone. Who was it?”

  At that exact moment my door swung open, and one of my least favorite people on earth walked in.

  “Hiya, Jackie. How have you been?”

  “Ah, hell,” I said. “And I didn’t think my day could get any worse.”

  It wasn’t an informer.

  It was Harry McGlade.

  Harry and I had a complicated, often contentious, past. Once upon a time, we were partners on the Job. He screwed that up, then went on to sell his life story to TV and they based a show on his exploits, and by unhappy extension-by-association, my exploits. It was called Fatal Autonomy, whatever the hell that meant, and the actress who played me was morbidly obese and wet her pants whenever she was in a dangerous situation. Which was all the time.

  Harry smiled when he saw me. “Ain’t life a peach?”

  “You keep coming back,” Herb said. “Like jock itch.”

  “Is that how you think of me?” Harry asked. “Softly clinging to your sweaty man bits? I’m flattered.”

  Herb and Harry had a mutual disparagement society. McGlade usually came out on top.

  “Why are you here?” Herb said.

  “Good question. Sagan said humanity exists so the universe can know itself. But I think we exist because our parents had sex. Were your parents as large as you are? How’d they get their parts to fit with their fat bellies in the way? Was there some sort of pulley system?”

  Herb stood up. “I’m outta here, Jack. Try not to let the stupid rub off on you.”

  Harry grinned. “Great burn there, Jabba th
e Butt. Still have to butter your hips to get through doorways? Or are you just eating the butter?”

  Herb walked past, shoulder-bumping Harry on his way out.

  “I don’t think he likes me,” Harry said. “I think it’s because I’m not covered in ham.”

  “What do you want, McGlade?” I could tolerate him in small doses, and I was already reaching my daily limit.

  Harry parked one ass cheek on the corner of my desk. “One of your least finest, some meter maid about the size of Herb’s last meal, arrested me on a trumped up hit-and-run warrant.”

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I said, pleased that there was nothing I could do.

  Well, maybe I could do something, but I wasn’t what you’d call motivated.

  “Jackie, you’re like a sister to me. A sister I sometimes think about while I’m showering.”

  “Ick.”

  “I’m kidding. Probably. But we go way back. You were at my wedding.”

  “The one where we all almost died.”

  “Yeah. Good times. I don’t ask you for a lot of favors—”

  “You’re constantly asking me for favors.”

  “—but I really need you to make this one go away. The charge is bullshit. I’d beat it in court. Why waste taxpayer money?”

  “So considerate of you, to be worried about the taxpayer.”

  He didn’t catch my sarcasm. “Yeah. Well, I’m one of them. I think. I know I pay my accountant a lot. He should be paying my taxes out of that. Right?”

  “Sure.”

  “But this really isn’t about me. I have to get back home. To Rover.”

  “You bought a dog?” I asked.

  “Rover’s a horse.”

  “You bought a horse?” I asked.

  “You know how sometimes, when you get blackout drunk, you can wake up in Cozumel with a ninety-two year old woman who isn’t wearing pants? Well this is the same thing, except I bought a dwarf miniature horse.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Herb said. He’d left the room, but was obviously hovering nearby.

  “I can actually hear your pancreas secrete insulin,” Harry called out after him. “It sounds like a toilet flushing.”

  I got up, closed my door, then pulled up Harry’s file on my computer. Other than an extraordinary amount of parking tickets, thirty-four to be exact, he wasn’t wanted for anything other than the reckless driving charge.